April 2021 New: Doing Something for Young Children's Self-Esteem
Doing something for self-esteem is vital for your child's success.
Help understand the impact of the abacus for learning students.
I'm the author of this article and I'm a qualified abacus teacher, answering questions from around the world online abacus and various questions from online-soroban.com students.
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While the physical condition and skills play a huge part in anyone’s performance, their psychological state of mind has equivalent weightage.
Without the proper mindset, even the most fiercely honed skills fail to show results.
The same is true for students writing exams.
No matter how much they’ve studied and practiced, if they don’t go into the exam with the right mindset, the result will be a guaranteed underperformance if not a failure.
It is therefore that necessary that the students have the right amount of self-confidence and the right amount of self-esteem.
Note that having overconfidence is not good as it brings with it an entirely different set of problems.
1-1.Exam Stress and Doing Something for Self-Esteem Among Struggling Math Students
Maths! The dreaded subject.
It is one of those subjects that students fear the most.
So naturally, their confidence levels tend to be the lowest when sitting for a math test or exam.
While this stress may come from an uncompleted syllabus, a feeling of poor revision, and many other causes, it has been observed that even students who did all those things were still experiencing stress.
For many, it could be the anticipation of getting poor marks.
Let us discuss this in more detail: What is stress exactly?
So stress is often categorized as an ‘emotional pain’.
Meaning it's not physical but a psychological manifestation of pain.
It is the distress caused due to pressure. It is not a natural state of being and indicated the person is going through emotional turmoil.
In the case of students, it could be because of the reasons we already discussed above.
The struggling math student: A portrait Students may struggle in maths due to many reasons.
Here we list out a few points:
- They didn’t pay attention to the teachers and the tutors.
- They didn’t cover the entire syllabus and studied selectively.
- They are not confident in their mastery of the subject.
- They are nervous about the result.
No matter what the reason for the stress may be, it will not let you focus on your studies properly and will eventually lead to underperformance.
Stressed-out students suffer from the following:
- They aren’t able to focus on their study material.
- They tend to eat more or less causing eating disorders in either case.
- They worry most of the time and hence end up wasting a lot of it.
- They seek validation in other students or via social media channels.
The above-mentioned sufferings may lead to any of the following conditions(could be more than one):
- The exam performance is poor
- The student left a question by mistake
- The final score is less than expected
- The student did not mention all the points or steps needed for a solution.
As you can guess, having stress is a big minus for any student who wants to get a decent score.
1-2.Doing Something for Self-Esteem Like Using the Abacus To Learn Maths
We have already looked at the various issues with stress and why it is caused.
Keeping all of them in mind, we can say that at heart, they arise out of not understanding the concepts properly or not being able to do the maths properly.
A big revelation is that most students who have average to above-average intelligence do understand the concepts of maths.
The problem arises when they have to apply the knowledge with calculations.
That is exactly where an abacus comes in.
What is an abacus? Simply put, the abacus is a very simple calculation tool.
It was developed sometime in early history to work out calculations needed for trade and animal husbandry.
What should students do with the abacus? Like any skill, working the abacus needs practice.
So the number one thing that the students should do is practice, practice, and more practice.
This is so they can overcome their problem of maths calculations.
The keyword here is diligence.
If there is a discipline in the approach, and the student focuses properly, the abacus can greatly improve the score.
Let's look at the benefits of the abacus in detail.
1-3. Doing Something for Self-Esteem To Help Students Learn Better
Let us look at what constitutes the learning process:
Perception: This is the initial stage of learning.
The person perceives something new, it could be through any of the five senses.
The new information is received by the brain.
Processing:
The received information is then confirmed by the brain and the brain tries to process it.
This basically means that the new information is absorbed into the brain.
Networking: This is arguably the most crucial part of the learning part.
Here, the brain tries to connect the dots.
Things that are already in the understanding of the individual are connected together with the new information.
This step is the reason why different people understand the same concepts differently.
What benefits does the abacus bring to the table?
- Improved calculation speeds.
- Improved calculation accuracy.
- Better ability to imagine.
- Improved spatial thinking.
- Confidence in their own work.
- The ability to think in logical terms without being bogged down by calculations.
- Improved dexterity
- Improved discipline As you can see, the list of benefits of using the abacus is a complete package in itself.
Every student should therefore be practicing abacus daily.
Overall
Even though some stress is helpful to the student and can help the student perform better, an overly stressed-out student is not the best possible situation to be in.
The demerits of stress are many and are very devastating to both the morale and career of the student.
Devices that improve the discipline and calculations of the students can help the students beat exam stress and confidently ace their math papers.
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